Comments on: Privacy or Portability, Which Will It Be?

By: Web Worker Daily » Archive Weekend Coffee Break «

Web Worker Daily » Archive Weekend Coffee Break « — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:46:36 +0000

[...] Data Portability Fuss – If the recent flap over Facebook data has you thinking about the issues of keeping your own personal data, you might want to stop by [...]

By: Helzerman’s Odd Bits » Blog Archive » Alpha testing free software on someone else’s site - yep, could be a problem…

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 03:56:48 +0000

[...] You can read reactions from Chris Brogan here and Anne Zelenka here. [...]

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 01:38:51 +0000

Yawn.

By: Jeremy Horn

Jeremy Horn — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 23:36:02 +0000

Anne, there have been a lot of arguments made on this today. Yours is definitely the most reasoned and logically argued. I agree… FB clearly prevents scraping. And, while I believe that (in the absence of a scraping clause) that data that is shared with me or others, public, is in public domain, in FB’s case I agree that the users would have be treated to a fair opt-in to share the data externally.

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy
http://tpgblog.com

By: Logical Extremes

Logical Extremes — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:16:15 +0000

Both Scoble and Facebook are in the wrong.

Scoble broke the terms of service, and potentially violated expectations of privacy of his “friends”. Facebook’s blunder, in this case, is more of a PR problem in how they handled it. On top of FB’s other recent blunders (with many issues still ongoing), it’s amazing that folks still want to play with them.

Anne, you make excellent points. FB does need to open up, BUT also needs to provide options for the data submitters on how far they are willing to let their personal data go.

By: Anne Zelenka

Anne Zelenka — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:55:56 +0000

Facebook probably has a number of objections to screen scraping, including the issue of keeping that information exclusively theirs. Still, presenting this as a situation of “it’s his data, let him do what he wants with it” doesn’t make room for the fact that it’s other people’s data, not just his.

Once you friend someone and allow them to see various aspects of your profile you do have to understand they can do what they want with that data including moving it by hand to other places. But an unreflective “set Scoble’s data free” doesn’t recognize that there are some thorny issues about exactly whose data it is and what should be allowed with regard to it.

By: Brian Carnell

Brian Carnell — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:47:16 +0000

Holostatute is right on. By definition, what you are doing on Facebook is not private, esp. if you are adding someone like Scoble to your friends list (I’m assuming most people added Scoble because of his inexplicable netceleb status rather than because they genuinely know him).

And Facebook has clearly demonstrated it could care less about your or my privacy. Its objection to scraping is almost certainly because it cannot monetize said scraping and it benefits from the lock-in it creates by forbidding it.

By: Mario Olckers

Mario Olckers — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:27:30 +0000

I have not thought of it this way, but I agree, what happens on Facebook, stays on Facebook… Right…? ;)

By: Chris Brogan...

Chris Brogan... — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:11:36 +0000

Interesting take on it, Anne. If I've added XYZ person as a friend on a social network, they suddenly have more of my data at their disposal. Right now, my Facebook friend adding policy is nothing. I say yes to anyone who isn't an obvious company-pretending-to-be-auser. Otherwise, you're in. Robert can take my data anywhere. I know him. It's okay if he wants to send me a birthday card. BUT, if I thought robots were going to be de rigeur, which could well be, then I'm going to be more wary. My thoughts on this.

By: halostatue

halostatue — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 16:53:19 +0000

Facebook has yet to understand that the privacy continuum ranges from deeply personal to widely public. I’d use Facebook more as a digital hub if it offered me a public presence or a way to export/synchronize Facebook data that I provide publicly. As it is, I feed my external sources into Facebook so that friends there can follow what I do on the wider web. If the inverse relationship were possible (update Facebook to notify the wider web), it’d have a better chance of capturing more than a couple of hours of my time a week (if that).

Even so, my needs are different for different people; the Facebook friends lists helps a little, but only a little, in making sure that my Facebook friends knowledge about me matches my real friends knowledge about me. (That is, my life is already partitioned based on the social groups in which I reside; Facebook is making it harder for those partitions to be represented.)